My Odroid XU4 build

One of the goals for my build was to try and stay cheap, but still milk out some good performance. I decided to go with the odroid XU4 board. The enclosure is a Mediasonic USB3 4-bay enclosure. I designed and 3d printed some parts that allowed me to mount the XU4 board on top of the Mediasonic enclosure.

Features -
$175 cost before hard drives
low power usage (not as low as other single board computers, but still pretty good)
~90MBs sustained speeds
temperature sensors and fans for HDDs and CPU
SMART status is reported for each HDD and openmediavault can access it.
8 core CPU + 2GB ram is more than enough for plex to transcode audio and video on multiple videos at once
4 * 3.5" hard drives
sata3 to usb3.0 bridge = 5gbit max bandwidth for HDDs
gbit ethernet

The post was edited 3 times, last by giantpune (Nov 11th 2015, 10:29pm).

Yes. By default, plex refuses to transcode anything on arm hosts. I had to manually edit the javascript file as described here htpcguides.com/fix-plex-server…enough-on-raspberry-pi-2/
Even my raspberry pi 2 (overclocked to 1GHz) was able to transcode 1080p movies with a similar OMV + plex setup. The XU4 board have more cores, faster clock, and twice the ram. It works fine for 2 clients watching movies in formats that it needs to transcode. I havent seen even a single bit of skipping or stuttering.

I have only a few people in my house and never expect more than 2 people streaming from the server at a time. One of these days I'll have to test multiple clients and see how many are able to watch movies before the server gets too taxed.

If you have a sample video you'd like me to test and report back, I'll give it a shot.

After a few weeks of usage, I have some graphs. This is with samba, ftp, nfs, plex, couchpotato, sickrage, transmission, and rsync services all being used daily. These cpu usage graphs even show the time with family coming over and streaming to different TVs over thanksgiving holiday.

Scratch that, I've got it now. I was just being impatient and needed to wait... a long time. Once the system time was flashing I did a reboot then ran ifconfig to get the IP. I'm now able to SSH into the system. Thanks.

Liitle question. Would it make a differecnce if you used the eMMC 5.0 instead of a regular class 10 card if used with 4-bay enclosure. Maybe plugins would load quicker but would you really see a difference?

Glad to see your build is working. I have had a probox for over a year and just got the xu4 last week. I threw OMV on an SD card but it wont boot. Did you use the img available here? Thanks!

yup, that's the one I used. It actually ran like crap right off the rip. I had to apt-get update and apt-get upgrade and got a newer version of OMV. After that, it was working well and I installed all the plugins and started setting it up

Liitle question. Would it make a differecnce if you used the eMMC 5.0 instead of a regular class 10 card if used with 4-bay enclosure. Maybe plugins would load quicker but would you really see a difference?

I think with a emmc vs sd card, where you'll actually see the performance is during bootup and when installing updates/plugins. Those are the times when its doing most of the reading and writing on the rootfs. Realistically, I'm rebooting mine less than once a week, and after the initial setup, I probably invest < 5 minutes a week installing updates. So for me, there isn't much to gain by running off emmc. I guess it all depends on your usage habits and how much you value not waiting.

yup, that's the one I used. It actually ran like crap right off the rip. I had to apt-get update and apt-get upgrade and got a newer version of OMV. After that, it was working well and I installed all the plugins and started setting it up

Ran like crap? What exactly was it doing wrong? I spent a lot of time creating that image and didn't release something that ran like crap. The first boot is extremely slow (especially with slow SD cards) because it is doing some filesystem work to take advantage of the entire SD card. And of course it has to updated when you first install because I can't create a new image daily. You can update everything from the web interface. No need for command line.

It was buggy. I was getting lots of popup boxes with stacktrace looking errors. I don't remember what all they said exactly. I got the error boxes doing things like formatting drives, creating filesystems, mounting filesystems, and other operations in the webui. I havent seen a popup with a stacktrace since that initial update.

Strange... The nice thing about making images is all the hardware is identical. The current image was my third release and I was actually using it a lot then. All I can think is you had a bad and/or not well supported sd card that was fixed in system software update (not omv). I haven't seen any complaints like that on the odroid forum and the image works with xu3 and xu4s.

I'm asking anyone. There's a handy starting guide mentioned in the first post where the guy changes CPU governors, makes a bit of tuning and claims far better read/write speeds. The XU4 will be delivered next week or so and I want to get it up and running as quick as possible (running a cubox-i4 pro atm) and I am gathering some info.